If the conduct of our ex-IGP is as despicable as some members of our judiciary would have us believe, the question remains, why was he sentenced so leniently?

I think, as I suspect many other Malaysians do, that the trial and prosecution of ex-IGP Abdul Rahim Noor amounts to nothing more than political shadow-play. Many Malaysians strongly suspect that the judiciary is largely, if not absolutely, under the control of the executive limb of government

For those reasons, I fear that many of us have lost respect for the law, in the sense that we no longer believe law to be a source of genuine moral obligation.

Respect for law cannot be rule by steel alone, as the late Prof Herbert Hart articulated in his classic The Concept of Law , Oxford University Press (1961).

In the early pages of that work, Hart distinguished law from what he termed as the "gunman situation writ large" - that is where we think of law as a source of obligation only to the extent that a violation of law is likely to be backed by a sanction.

That account of legal obligation, according to Hart, fails because it does not distinguish the commands of law from the dictates of a gun-toting gangster. The will of a gangster is not a source of genuine obligations at all, because that will is not grounded in any independent moral reason that makes it a source of obligations.

We respect law because we think it is a vehicle for justice that is the essential quality to legal obligations. If we stop believing that, then we lose any full-blooded argument for thinking that our law is worthy of respect.

Rahim's meagre sentence is best interpreted as an attempt by the executive-controlled judiciary to pull wool over the eyes of Malaysians and the international community. The shadow-play by the courts/government in question assumes the importance of the idea that we must reasonably believe that our courts are still beholden to the ideal of justice, so as to provide some reason for thinking that our law is worthy of respect. I italicise 'reasonably' because I do not think that Malaysians are as stupid as all that, and I am relatively confident that the international community does not consist of imbeciles either. We know the gunman situation writ large when we see it.

A token sentencing, as the case of Rahim suggests, particularly when its motivation is in question, does not encourage deeper respect for law but renders it even more suspect. We do not want the law to be used as central to a political puppet-show because it then loses the nobility we associate with it and ultimately, destroys the very fabric of respect of law.